Business Showcase : Eventbrite

Eventbrite is the world’s largest event technology platform. We issue around three million tickets every week, for nearly three million events around the globe each year. Music festivals, venues, marathons, conferences, hackathons, classes, sports events, charity fundraisers, gaming competitions – you name it, we power it.

How are you different?

Over ten years ago, Eventbrite pioneered self-service ticketing as well as an open data approach. We enabled event creators to set up their event online and to start selling tickets within minutes, without having to talk to anyone at Eventbrite. And we gave them real time access to all of their event and attendee data, when other ticketing companies guarded this information like a state secret.

We’ve grown a lot since the early days – we expect to process tickets worth well over three billion Euros this year, and ticket ever larger events – but technology leadership and this open data approach still set us apart.

We are quite happy for our customers to dock their favourite services onto Eventbrite, too, or to seamlessly sync their data to in-house solutions via our open APIs. Over the past ten years these open interfaces have triggered an ecosystem of over 170 useful integrations that organisers can use alongside our platform, including Salesforce, Mailchimp, Sched, or WordPress.com – all of them listed on our own Appstore called Eventbrite Spectrum.

It is doing well because we give event creators the tools to own their events, to better understand their attendees, and to sell more tickets. We are one of the very few real tech companies in ticketing, with more than 180 product, engineering, and design professionals, and that allows us to continuously develop and fine tune our platform to reflect the latest technology and e-commerce trends.

Where are you based?

Eventbrite is headquartered in San Francisco and has a team presence in ten countries and four continents. The platform is being used by event creators in 180 countries. In Ireland, we have offices in Dublin and Cork.

Earlier this year, we acquired a European competitor, which made us the third largest ticketing provider in Europe, with 35 million European tickets sold in 2016. Most recently, winning the contract to ticket the entire PGA European Tour is pretty far up there: You can already buy your tickets for the 2018 Irish Open in Ballyliffin on Eventbrite. And then there’s our general success in Ireland. We opened our first office here in 2014, and in just over three years well over 100,000 event creators have trusted Eventbrite to sell tickets worth tens of millions of Euros.

What type of people are you trying to attract to your product?

We have two key audiences: People running events, and people looking for and attending events. Unlike most competitors, we don’t just focus on one event category – or size of event. You can find all kinds of experiences on Eventbrite, from smaller, quirky ones, to large conferences and festivals.

What are your long-term plans for your product/company?

We are currently developing the company beyond ticketing, and are investing into access technology like our proprietary wristband technology, our event discovery platform, or more tailored registration products for our large corporate clients.

We want to become the world’s marketplace for events for both event creators looking to sell out their events with a truly independent technology partner, and for event goers who are looking to find their next great live experience.

How do people get in touch with you?
Event creators who want to start selling tickets can simply go to Eventbrite.ie to get going. If you’re hosting a large or complex event, you can call our experts at 1800 937 094 for help.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking